


Heliotropism

by saltstreets



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: M/M, Manipulative Relationship, Touch-Starved, and other fun times in Mutiny Dream Camp!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 01:03:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20573897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltstreets/pseuds/saltstreets
Summary: It was things like simple daylight, intangible and difficult to define until it was suddenly taken away, that man needed most to survive.





	Heliotropism

**Author's Note:**

> It's 4am and I'm dying but I had to get this out of my head. I wanted to write smut tonight, goddammit! But I got this instead.

The dark season had brought everyone low, of course it had. It wasn’t right for men to live so long without the light. That first winter Tozer had thought it wasn’t going to be so terrible: after all, the weak, quivering Arctic sun provided very little in way of heat. But it wasn’t just the warmth that was missed. The darkness crawled over your spine while you worked, and played tricks on your eyes. The mind went funny without the sun to chase out strange thoughts and notions.

But even so he hadn’t properly realised just how miserable he was in the absence of the sunlight until it returned. Those first few days of spring with their brief snatches of daylight were more relief than he had felt in a long time. There was still no warmth, but to feel the light against his cheeks, grown sallow in the long dark, was a cure greater than anything he might find in a bottle down in the doctors’ supply cabinet. Even as most everything else about their situation deteriorated, the return of the sun lifted the crew.

It was things like simple daylight, intangible and difficult to define until it was suddenly taken away, that man needed most to survive.

When Hickey first touched him it felt just as it did when the sun had skated out over the horizon after winter, if just for a moment. How long had it been since Tozer had felt a friendly touch? A pat on the back, a familiar word and an arm slung over his shoulder? All the things he had been so accustomed to before. Just little things he had always taken for granted but which when removed left awful, clawing holes. In the dim of the tent Hickey’s hands felt warm, far warmer than the sun ever did. He smiled as he traced the lines of Tozer’s shoulders beneath his shirt. Hickey was always so neatly put together even now after everything. Even here, under the dirty canvas. The only evidence betraying their circumstances was the slightly chapped skin of his palms, smoothing along Tozer’s sides and slipping round to tug lightly at his belt. No mistaking that. Tozer’s cock stirred in his trousers but he was more preoccupied in basking in the sensation of proximity that wasn’t borne out of cold necessity. Of hands touching him that were not his own. He had lived in such close quarters with his own men for so long and always in comfort, but here in the camp somehow isolation had set in.

“What are you going to give me, sergeant?” Hickey asked, still smiling and stroking a thumb lightly over a strip of skin exposed at Tozer’s waist where Hickey had pulled up his shirt. “What are you going to offer?”

_Everything_, Tozer thought, and opened to Hickey like a flower unfurling towards the sun.

He didn’t say it out loud, but it didn’t seem he needed to. He was almost certain Hickey already knew. There should have been something unsettling about that but Tozer ignored it, too wrapped up in the warmth radiating from another body so close.

“Things are going to happen very soon,” Hickey promised him, pulling Tozer down to speak quietly to his ear. “You’re going to have to be ready.” A hand on the back of Tozer’s neck, Hickey’s body pressed close in a slender line. It was easy to forget things, trapped in the slow march over the ice and rock. But Tozer remembered this: he remembered he needed this.

The sun was back, and truly now. Late spring sun, turning to early summer soon enough. The leads would be opening up somewhere behind them, with _Terror_ and _Erebus _just waiting, poised to leap. It was all so obvious to Tozer’s mind. They didn’t belong here, they belonged back on their ships: he just needed Hickey to see it too. But some nights Hickey didn’t come back to the tent and Tozer didn’t know where he went. To go stand out on the expanse of shale, perhaps, with his coat -_Irving’s coat-_ unbuttoned and his arms spread out like he couldn’t feel the cold at all. Tozer would lie there, awake and alone, waiting for non-existent returning footsteps until he fell into a cold, fitful sleep and woke curled in on himself.

But the sun was back. Tozer turned towards the sun. When Hickey took the polished stock of the rifle to his skull with a dull crack, Tozer was facing away.


End file.
